Green Room

On real political maturity

Michelle Malkin takes on the father-knows-best self-proclaimed grown-ups of the GOP establishment in the person of Michael Gerson. He pledges his fealty to the up-till-now entrenched Beltway establishment, condemning Tea Party activists (a.k.a. voters) for their political immaturity. He’s not impressed with mere Web site operators, either. (It might be instructive to compare the ever-shrinking readership of the ever-shrinking Post, with all its resources, to that of Malkin’s nearly one-woman-run site, but I guess that’s not relevant to Gerson’s argument.)

We are children in his eyes:

Actually, [Rove] is a former high-level policy aid to the president of the United States and the primary author of two presidential victories. This does not make him always right. But it means he has had responsibilities bigger than running a Web site. This is an advantage for a commentator, not a drawback.

In Tea Party theory, inexperience is itself seen as a kind of qualification. People like O’Donnell are actually preferable to people like Rove, because they haven’t been tainted by public trust or actual achievement. This is the attitude of the adolescent — the belief that the world began on their thirteenth birthday. It is also a sign of childish political thought.

Childish political thought, as in ignorantly voting for a certain candidate because it’s become the cool thing to do? No, he’s not talking about the brainless army of drones that got Obama elected.

He’s talking about recalcitrant voters who think they know best how to live their own lives. The GOP establishment sees us just as liberals do, as incompetents in need of babysitting. And when the people make it clear they’ve had enough of the status quo, Gerson and company call them “childish.”

Is repeatedly getting the shaft from our elected representatives, year after year and decade after decade, and coming back for more, a sign of maturity? Au contraire: it’s dysfunctional, irresponsible, and profoundly immature behavior. Thanks to “childish political thought,” we’ve enabled governmental abuse to grow wildly out of control, to the point that our arrogant representatives laugh at us and our quaint notions that they ought to abide by the Constitution and read their monster bills before shoving them down our throats.

Tea Party voters are informed, engaged, and ready to act in their own and their country’s best interests. That’s nothing if not mature. The 2010 election may signal the coming of age of the conservative voter.

If Gerson had been trying to crystallize the insider, GOP establishment attitude the Tea Party so distrusts, and is so eager to upset and uproot, he couldn’t have done much better. His criticism, and Rove’s, are likely stoking the Tea Party fire.

Michelle also brings us this news, which demonstrates that the Dems, like the GOP establishment, are so wholly out of touch with the mood of the country they can’t feel the earth rumbling beneath their feet:

President Obama’s political advisers, looking for ways to help Democrats and alter the course of the midterm elections in the final weeks, are considering a range of ideas, including national advertisements, to cast the Republican Party as all but taken over by Tea Party extremists, people involved in the discussion said.

If you’re looking to make a donation to further the cause of conservatism this fall, consider one targeted to make such an ad possible. These geniuses are begging for more rope.

Yeah, as Party Politics…[died]…in 1980, 1992, 1968, 1948, the Great Depression….

BradSchwartze on September 20, 2010 at 2:33 PM

Those were all moments when the party men declared that party politics were over. Now, the party men like Rove and Gerson are pitching childish fits of their own as we exercise our God-given right to self-determination in our lawful right to vote.

I may not have a lot of logical, rational basis for optimism, but I’d rather look on the bright side of things than live my life in the mire of misery.